Cloning must be stopped say Greens
07 January 2002
The Green Party has called for an end to cloning experiments, claiming that they offer false hopes and real dangers to people suffering injury and illness.
Margaret Wright, Green Party Principal Speaker, said: "These experiments are a cruel deception. Researchers have shown us the successfully cloned animals. But for every so-called 'success', hundreds have died soon after birth and others have suffered horrific deformities. The significant risk of transmitting animal viruses through organ transplants to humans, possibly in epidemic proportions, has not been addressed."
Green Party policy is to promote more sensible and effective approaches to enhancing health, such as preventative health measures, increasing the pool of human donors, research into artificial organs, and the surgical repair of damaged organs.
The issue of Xenotransplantation (using animals as organ donors for humans) is not the Green Party's only concern. Margaret Wright continued: "The purpose of many of these experiments, whether or not Xenotransplantation becomes possible, is to improve the techniques of genetic modification and cloning. This raises the spectre of genetically modified and cloned farm animals, with unknown animal suffering and risk to both humans and the environment. Other experiments will be used to perfect the technique of cloning human embryos for use as stem cell tissue and quite probably to produce cloned human beings.
"These experiments are an assault on the sanctity of life and carry unknown risks and hazards. The rush for profit has driven much of this research and human suffering has been used to justify cruel experiments and keep our attention away from the true motives of the companies and researchers involved."
